Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/255

 The Rythmical Line 249 in close reciprocal relations with the dance and music, can be taken as the earliest form of rhythmical poetical utterance. "At a more advanced stage of primitive culture we find, as the result of joint labor, the work-song whose melody and rhythm are determined by the labor In the work-song it is the con- stantly recurring rhythm of the work that tends directly to the repetition of the rhythmic and melodic motives The musical element of speech, at this stage, is the refrain. One might say, without qualification, that the poetic form of speech began with the refrain." It seems correct to say that the rhythmical form of poetry is not a self-generated phenomenon of language; it received its regular and rhythmical form from early close relation with music and the dance. Such views as these are not the result of speculative theorizing; they rest on the investigations of ethnology and folk-psychology. At the bottom of all the conscious rhythmical activities lies pleasure in rhythmical motion. "The earliest aesthetic stimuli are symmetry and rhythm." PH. SEIBERTH. Washington University.